Second the Tubus Fly, for a fast road bike it’s the best looking rack available, very minimal, very lightweight, and works well. Don’t have discs on my bike, but pretty sure I’ve seen them fitted to bikes with discs.

What’s wrong with your current bikes?

11 speed rings will work fine with 10 speed. You might be able to replace the chain rings, but it depends on the BCD of your current chainset. I don’t think you can go below 38t on 130BCD, but there are loads of options for 110BCD.

^ Probably this. How does average speed compare across the rides? Strava gives me much higher averages because it ignores everything below about 3 or 4 kph.

Another one to add to the list of things you’re not supposed to question the environmental impacts of on STW:

1. Eating meat.
2. Pets (particularly dogs).
3. Wood burning stoves.

If, as it sounds, you’ve both got right of access over it, can’t you just reinstate the parking area that you say used to exist in your back garden? They can’t then park on the drive without blocking your access, so they’ll either have to keep parking wherever the current owner does, or reinstate their own back garden parking.

Check that you’ve definitely got right of access in the deeds before doing any work, but I’d imagine that this would be your cheapest option (other than hoping that the new neighbours keep letting you park there).

It’s not cyclocross you’re doing, it’s just cycling, of the sort that I used to do as a kid on my mountain bike in the days when mountain bikes were fully rigid and had 1.75″ tyres that you pumped up to 40 PSI. It’s probably pretty much the same sort of cycling that my dad did as a kid on his Raleigh 3 Speed. It’s what loads of families in the Netherlands and Denmark and Germany still do on their bikes at the weekends. A bit of road, some paths, a few forest tracks, some gravel fire roads.

One of the problems cycling has had for a long time in Britain is that it’s always been viewed as a hobby, for special interest groups, and we’ve been convinced as a nation to buy loads of specialist bikes with fat draggy tyres and suspension that’s a pain on the road, or skinny racing tyres that are useless off it, when 90% of people would have been better off on some sort of “hybrid” (or what we probably once thought of as just a regular bicycle). I’m hopeful that the “cyclocross” and “gravel” phase is the last throw of this obsession with sport, sure the names are still stolen from racing, but at least the bikes are getting a bit more sensible. Hopefully once these are going out of fashion we might see bike shops that look like the ones in Northern Europe, with bikes properly designed for riding to work, or around town, or on some paths at the weekend.

You could tell that as soon as the first one went that Stokes was going to fall apart. Pressure must have been horrendous.

Your gardener must have been on holiday for ages! You probably want to take out those stray blades of grass, they’re disturbing the moss.

XACD is the Far East Ti builder that a lot of people seem to have used. Worth a Google, very cheap, but some rather mixed reviews of the service.

London bike builders that spring to mind include Saffron, Donhou, Hartley and Talbot, but I doubt that any of them are cheap.

Downlands Cycles/Invicta Frameworks are near Canterbury and do bike building courses for about £1000. Not sure how much it would cost to just get a frame made, but I’d imagine they would be at the better value end in the UK.

Worth having a look on LFGSS, there’s a lot of custom steel going on. As well as all the London/UK based framebuilders, there are a few Polish guys who seem quite popular, and might be worth a try: Rychtarski and Orlowski. Also have vague memories of a few blog posts by people who bought custom Ti from China or Russia, but can’t remember the names.

Alcoholic drinks contain gluten..?

If it’s fermented from wheat or barley it will do unless it’s been distilled, but that basically just means beer. Nearly all spirits, wines and ciders are gluten free unless they’ve had something funny added to them.

Brilliant, but can’t quantify that with watts or seconds saved.

This is kind of worth considering, although the science is pretty inexact. According to Specialized, new wheels, a well fitting skin suit, an aero helmet, and shaving your arms and legs all deliver similar savings, with obviously the wheels the most expensive of those. If he is set on buying new wheels anyway, then deep sections make the most sense, but if he just wants to get faster he should think about buying a skin suit and aero helmet first. And he should shave and look at his position because those are (almost) free.

Being a couple of millimetres off is irrelevant, you’ll adapt to it as soon as you start moving. The only reason you might need to get it exactly right would be to satisfy your OCD.

I was just about to suggest the 45mm Cosine wheels too. Got a great review on road.cc: http://road.cc/content/review/173352-cosine-45mm-full-carbon-clincher-wheelset

I doubt there’s a race in the UK where light weight trumps aero (within reason).

25c road tyre and 40mm rim = 65mm wide side profile.
2″ MTB tyre and 15mm rim = 65mm wide side profile.

Can’t imagine it will make much difference. A couple of disc wheels and then you might start to notice it.

I’d say for a town bike you could do with more rise and more reach, the 22″ might be a better fit.

I managed to get the top off my Finish Line Dry Lube bottle with some pliers.

Thank you! Had given it a quick go by hand but hadn’t budged so assumed the top was fixed, now got it off with some pliers, so all sorted now.

Thanks for the helpful (and not so helpful) responses.

Can’t get it into the old lube bottles because the ‘dropper’ section is not removable. Might try the kitchen supplies place tomorrow, see if they have some sort of sauce bottle that might be suitable.

If you want tubing and connectors, worth looking at Kee Klamp.

Tensions were off.

Maybe you’ve just got bad taste?

In your situation I think I’d buy something else that does have discs that I could ride now. They seem pretty sensible for general sportive/4-season use. Missing a summer of riding to wait for a particular brand of bike to get disc brakes seems less sensible to me. When it comes down to it, bikes are pretty similar really, riding’s more important.

Yes, mine do this too. I just let it build up and then take them apart them every couple of months to clean. Doesn’t seem to have done too much harm so far. I guess you could soak them in sterilising solution, might get rid of the mould without requiring the fiddly dismantling process.

Pretty much everyone’s legs are different lengths, for a lot it’s close enough not to matter, but for a sizeable number it will be noticeable at certain times, like on a bike. A good bike fit should check and sort this out, generally with shims under one of your cleats.

People on this thread arguing that their SUV is actually a 4×4:

Let’s off-road!

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/tools/cycling-tools/mini-pump/product/review-bontrager-air-rush-road-pump-10-39705/

Tiny little pump, fits easily in jersey pockets, and can use C02 cartridges too.

CX assuming normal hard packed gravel, maybe MTB if it’s very loose or has larger stones.

Not sure why so many are so quick to claim it’s dodgy or at risk of a chargeback? You’re just receiving money via PayPal and sending the item via courier, no different to the vast majority of other eBay sales?

I’ve bought a few bikes down as collect only and arranged for a courier to pick them up. They tend to go a lot more cheaply than when the seller is willing to post. Of course I always contact the seller before bidding to check that it’s ok, but it sounds like an honest mistake.

And this is why we can’t have nice things…

I guess it’s pushing it a bit for ‘in and around’ Cardiff, but this is one of the hardest I’ve been up in the area and/or ever: https://www.strava.com/segments/7367267

There’s no real continuous beach at the base of the White Cliffs, there are sections of beach and bits of sea wall at St. Margaret’s at Cliffe and Kingsdown, but they don’t join up. You might manage it on foot at very low tide, but I think it would be pretty risky. The cliff top path is generally pretty busy with walkers, so it wouldn’t make for ideal riding either. Kingsdown to Ramsgate has no cliffs, it’s just a pebble beach, with a few groynes in places. It makes a nice road ride, with a few bits of cycle path, but maybe not what you’re looking for?

It is a normal USB, but I’ve found that while any brand of cable seems to work for charging, mine only syncs to my computer via the Garmin branded one. Not sure why exactly this is.

Does the video explain how some types of racism are bad, but some are good, based on the skin colour of those on the receiving end?

Maybe you should watch the video before commenting on it? But in answer to your question, no, he explicitly says that it has nothing to do with skin colour, it has to do with centuries of subjugation, enslavement and the building of a system that continues to massively disadvantage certain sections of society to this day. I don’t entirely agree with what he says, and I don’t want to portray myself as some kind of spokesperson for women or ethnic minorities because I am neither, but I think that sexism and racism both have to be understood within a historical context and with regard to the balance of power within society.

How about firemen calendars?

See above. It’s closer, but it’s still not the same. It’s easy for men to be happy with this stuff when it’s far less common and it’s not just the tip of the iceberg in a system still full of inbuilt discrimination.

On a more positive note I think it’s great that there are more and more women in cycling, and that they’re standing up to companies like these when they feel that they’ve got something wrong.

It’s all very well lots of men declaring themselves not offended by this, but it’s also almost completely irrelevant. It has obviously offended a number of female cyclists, which in my view is a bad thing.

As for comparing it to men on magazine covers, that’s missing the point rather too. If scantily clad men were regularly being used to sell products in a massively female dominated market then that would be more similar, but it still wouldn’t come close as it doesn’t have a system with a history and present of inbuilt inequality behind it. I’m sure a lot of you have seen this video already, and it’s about racism, not sexism, but the same principles apply:

Vitoria Rubino Pros on my winter bike. Hard-wearing, seem very puncture proof, cheap. Grip and comfort not quite up there with GP4Seasons/GP4000s that I run on my race bike, but perfectly serviceable for 99% of my riding.

It’s more expensive to build, and generates less value than rooms above ground. In London where land prices are high most new developments do have basements of some sort, whether that’s habitable rooms in new houses or small blocks of flats, or plant space/refuse storage and bike or car parking in larger developments.

A quick google suggests that in Canada they have to dig footings below the frost line anyway, so once they’ve done that, they may as well use the walls they’ve built for a basement without much additional cost. We don’t have to dig as deep, so the additional cost of a basement is higher.

They can’t actually send any of them out, because then all those who didn’t get one would be up in arms about it.

If you restricted it to countries that don’t have any of those problems you’re basically left with Western Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and South Korea. And even then you still have the ‘white elephant’ problem, just look at how much we are spending converting our Olympic stadium into a football ground, in return for a tiny rent that is unlikely to ever cover the cost.

They’ve already spent the money anyway, boycotting at this point just means that they don’t get any of the money back, and that’s as likely to hurt the people as it is the administration, which does seem to be on the verge of collapsing anyway.

I think there’s definitely an argument for reform of the IOC and Olympics though, to make it a much more flexible event, able to adapt to individual host cities rather than requiring such massive redevelopment and construction for a month long event.